1. Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to an electric device for communication, a power management system and a method for controlling the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of Information Technology (IT), the number of household appliances powered by electricity is rapidly increasing, in turn leading to increasing power consumption. In order to satisfy such increased power demand, the number of power plants is rapidly increasing. However, as can be seen from a power demand pattern, peak capacity is not reached during most days of the year, that is to say, power plants only operate at full capacity during a few days out of the year.
A state in which a high power demand is required for a short time is called peak load. During periods of peak load, electricity costs the most to generate and deliver, and therefore power providers raise the power rate charged to consumers during periods of peak load Construction costs for adding an additional power plant to the grid are extremely high and maintenance costs for power plants constructed to maintain peak load for a short period of time are considerable.
Recently, numerous developers have conducted research into a demand management method for temporarily restricting power consumption by limiting peak load without constructing such additional power plants. For the aforementioned purposes, demand management is a focus of attention, and a great deal of research is focused upon an advanced demand management format for demand response (DR).
DR is a system for intelligently managing energy consumption depending upon variation in power rates, thereby balancing demand and supply of power.
By means of the DR, a power-supply source can alter end user power consumption to achieve load balancing and can restrict end user power consumption to periods where demand is low, thereby reducing the user's overall energy expenditure.
Therefore, an energy management system (EMS) to which demand response (DR) is applied has been developed. The EMS receives power rate information from the power provider, and displays the received power rate information through a display.
In addition, the EMS communicates with a variety of electric devices, and controls operations of individual electric devices on the basis of power rates. In this case, each electric device is a smart electric device capable of performing power monitoring and communication.
For communication between the EMS and the smart electric device, a user or administrator has to manually register the smart electric device in the EMS.
In this case, the user or administrator has to manually input a unique ID, an IP address and a gateway IP address of the smart electric device to the EMS, and has to manually input an IP address and a gateway IP address even to the smart electric device. In addition, the user or administrator has to input an ID and the like of the smart electric device to the gateway.
In addition, when the smart electric device is removed or replaced, the user or administrator has to manually delete a unique ID, an IP address, etc, of the corresponding smart electric device registered in the EMS.
As described above, according to the related art, when registration, re-registration, correction, or deletion of the electric device is performed in the EMS, the user or administrator has to manually input an ID, an IP address, etc. of the smart electric device, resulting in complicated processes and user inconvenience.